“Imperative” is not a word to be thrown around lightly. It stresses upon the vitally important, the critical, and perhaps the unavoidable. At the same time, imperatives needn’t be intimidating for they help shape the world around us as we know it. Likewise, Digital Transformation isn't a choice anymore for any business. It’s imperative because the economy demands people, technology, and business to be unified; to pursue innovative and agile operating models; find newer ways of accelerating growth and profitability. But then, like anything worth achieving, this transformation also requires the right approach and the mastery of three critical outcomes: Experiences, Productivity, and Empowerment.

One evening I was having drinks with some colleagues after work and, as should come as no surprise, the topic made its way to Scrum - more specifically, what was the best advice we’d ever heard on the subject.

Time and time again, the strategy that is driving business and seeing some of the most significant returns is personalization. Gartner predicts that e-commerce businesses that personalize successfully could see profits rise by up to 15% by 2020. Apart from the vision, strategy, and talent, you need the right tools; and much like a carpenter is crippled without a hammer, our modern business landscape is growing ever reliant on personalization engines.

Business innovation and the opportunities they create is how enterprises distinguish themselves from one another. It is how they do things better, how they create value, and ultimately, how they pass that value over to the customer. Business innovation isn’t a box you can check off and forget about, rather, it is a continuous effort that is empowered by technologies and methodologies that are available at any given moment. Today, that technology is artificial intelligence.

Words can be funny; more specifically, how the same word can have incredibly different meanings for different people. Take the word scrum for example. For 95% of the population, that word either elicits thoughts of people in jerseys all huddled together about to restart a game, or holds no meaning at all. However, when you change the ‘s’ to a capital, to us, the word Scrum takes on a whole new meaning.

The challenge with the customer experience is that it is ever-evolving, and all too often we are seeing the seemingly infinite demands of the customers met with the finite limitations of people. So how can brands meet these demands? When you take into account Gartner’s statement that “By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human,” the answer becomes simple - technology. And there are none that exist that are so perfectly poised to improve nearly every facet of the customer experience like artificial intelligence.

Have you ever driven down a road that was incredibly uneven or bumpy? Did you ever get frustrated trying to install a piece of software on your computer? Have you ever eaten at a restaurant and had lousy food and even worse service? If you said yes, then you have been a victim of poor user experiences that you haven't forgotten. While UX is a crucial element in both the digital and physical world, it is in digital that we see the value of UX skyrocket, and that is for one reason - choice.

Socrates was an ardent critic of the written word and his most famous pupil Plato once wrote that “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written.”

Hi there, it’s me, your customer. The one you spend millions of dollars trying to connect with during the waking hours? Ya, that one. Well, guess what? I am connected. But perhaps the term “connected” is misleading. I prefer to view myself as “empowered.” And if you want to connect with me, you first need to understand what this empowerment is, and I won’t lie, it borders on superpowers!

If millions of years of human evolution have taught us anything, it is that people have always preferred the use of voice to interact. However, for decades it was agreed that the technology “wasn’t quite there yet” to be used with machines. In the interim, nose-to-the-phone model of personal computing became the defacto standard, and no one really questioned it. Things have really begun to change in the past few years as Apple Siri, Amazon Echo, and Google Talk gained momentum and their QoE is a welcome relief.